Lothen
Lothen, City of Silver Spires, circa 1370 DR, Part 1 This magnificent city of silvery stone once marked the southern border of Siluvanede. Before Eaerlann annexed it, Lothen was a center of studies for the Siluvanedenn. The rampaging hordes from Hellgate Keep never reached the City of Silver Spires, so Lothen was spared from the devastation wrought by the demons elsewhere in the High Forest. Today, Lothen's slender stone towers till stand strong, but the great city is populated by orcs from the Tanglethorn, Sharpspike, and Horned Lord tribes. Orc druids have converted several of the old elven temples into temples of Malar, and the forest around Lothen is filled with beasts of Malar that serve as spies and sentries for their orc druid masters. Far below Lothen lies a stronghold of House Dlardrageth, which occupies several long-forgotten conjuring chambers. The city is small, barely a quarter of a mile across at its widest point. Picture, on a broad hilltop in deep woods, a cluster of tall, thin stone towers with flaring bases (familiar with a Staunton-pattern chess set? look at a bishop, with its base sweeping up to a ring surmounted with a stylized mitre—yes? Okay, replace the mitre with a tall, slowly-tapering-thinner cylinder (like a candle), topped with a conical point (roof) and flagstaff, not crenellated battlements around a flat roof . . . and you have the “look” of Lothen’s towers, which are studded irregularly is, at various heights, some of them on the interior spiral stairs, not just at each floor, and adjacent towers seldom have floors at the same height as each other with tall, narrow windows up and down the length of their upper “rises” soaring cylinder above the ring, and yes, the towers have the rings like the chess pieces; several Amnians who’ve seen the towers of Lothen have described them as “a lot of giant candlesticks, with fresh candles in them”). A few of these towers were built without internal stairs, but rather had a central open shaft and an “elevator” akin to a Tenser’s floating disc that rose up and down the shaft; of these, only two discs still function, and one unreliably; most have been replaced by pulley-cage elevators enspelled with feather fall for safety reasons. None of the towers have external doors above ground level; rather, their uppermost cellars “let out” into “the ways” of the city (its network of streets, wagonyards, and stables), which rise to the surface in seven “gatehouses.” The gatehouses are defensible stone structures sharing a uniform architecture: a circular stone-roofed “house” that covers the ramp up from the ways, and has a broad, flexible log portcullis resembling a real-world “roll-up-into-the-ceiling” garage door, moved by ropes and pulleys (and that can be locked in the down position with wooden crossbeams dropped into sockets at the bottom and midway up, on the inside of the door, that the door is then latched to with swiveling “hands” of stout wood that pivot down from the inside the door to clamp onto the beams, trapping them between hand and door. Around each gatehouse are stone walls planted with thorn-vines and “strangling vines” (carnivorous vines that clutch at creatures who get too close) along their outsides only; viewed from directly above, they take the shape of elongated ovals (like many real-world pharmaceutical capsules), with the long axis holding the “road approaching the gatehouse.” Along the tops of the walls are set ballistae that can fire down into the interior of the oval, out into the forest around, or “along” the oval to menace the approach when the outer gates are open. So the gatehouse “proper” (the entrance to the underground “ways”) is at the inside end of the oval, and the outer gates (formerly pairs of “swing outwards” elaborate enspelled lattices of structure entwined with growing plants, but now merely pairs of stout wooden vertical-log doors that swing outwards, rolling on wooden wheels; like the gatehouse doors, they can be braced with massive inner treetrunk crossbeams if the city is under attack). Viewed from the air, Lothen covers an area the shape of a closed-in (that is, no holes) numeral eight (or if you prefer, a large oval that overlaps a smaller oval, the smaller oval directly northeast of the larger one). There are seven gatehouses, six spaced evenly around the arc of the larger oval, and one at the “head” or midpoint (away from the larger oval) of the smaller oval. Above ground, Lothen is unwalled and a riot of food-garden plants, many of them gigantic vines that have been trained up lines affixed to windows in the towers, down which young and nimble inhabitants clamber to harvest vegetables, seeds, and herbs. Not all of Lothen’s “spires” are of the same height or radius. Twelve “great towers” are about ninety feet across and taller than the rest, but another thirty-two towers are much smaller and shorter—and two additional great towers and six smaller ones lie in ruins, blasted and fallen (in long-ago spellbattle, elves fighting elves) long ago to leave their exposed stone “roots” (which were shunned by elven inhabitants and have become thickly overgrown). The towers of Lothen are all of “silvery stone” for the same reason the surviving ones remain sturdy to this today: they were built of quarried stone blocks that were fused together by spells that provided great heat and pressure, and at the same time allowed elven spell-artificers to sculpt and smooth the stone, to form solid one-piece but intricate masses of stone (think “vitreous” or “glass,” but not transparent glass). Some tower windows have sheets of “clarified” and even in some cases tinted mica fused into place across the window openings, but most were fitted with translucent plant membranes (like giant, see-through leaves), made to grow over window-openings and open only when gently and properly manipulated (and braced with wooden hoop-and-stick assemblies, when it’s desired that they stay open). These membranes usually remain closed, permitting air currents to pass through them, but absorbing moisture (so it never “rains in”). In winter, when the membranes curl up and wither (new ones will grow in spring) interior shutters are slid into channels around a window, rather like a sliding real-world chalkboard is slid into guide-channels that support and hold it in place, to cover the windows (these may be of wood, slate, or sheets of spell-fused stone). Below ground, Lothen is a labyrinth of broad, sweeping stone-lined tunnels (walls and floors made of smooth blocks of fitted stone holding up shaped “overarch” blocks that form a ceiling, everything unmortared to let water seep freely through) that form “the ways” of the city (about forty to sixty feet below grade). The “ways” go around the “roots” of towers, not under or through them. Doors in the walls of the “ways”, defended and enspelled in various ways (and it’s rare for such a door to not have, at the very least, an inner “lip” that makes it impossible a door can be forced inwards without destroying the door, and a “chime” doorbell/alarm that signals elsewhere whenever a door is moved into or out of its frame opened), open into the subterranean entrance halls of the city towers, or into storage chambers (daenen, or pantries/larders) that slope downwards. Most of these doors are small (wide enough for two elves to pass through at once, hip to hip), and most of them open out of alcoves in the walls of the ways that were built as stopping-places for wagons, or out of “wagonyards” (side-caverns opening off the ways, in which wagons are stored, parked, and worked on). Most daenen and other storage chambers are accessed from tower entrance halls, not directly from the ways, and there are also secret passages leading down from towers into family vaults (almost always “treasure safe-storage,” not burial, though tales of undead lurking in some of them argue that tombs were hidden in at least a handful of these “secret ways”) and occasionally to deeper chambers that are either natural caverns (usually maintained as water-collection cisterns, their walls carpeted in carefully-tended plants that absorb “taints” pollutants and poisons) or secret meeting-places (like the “forgotten conjuring chambers” used by House Dlardrageth). Lothen was built where it is because of “sweetwater” (pure, clean water) filtering up into some natural caverns here in the form of a “seeping spring” that made for lush plant growth and provided ample drinking and agricultural water. Sanitation in Lothen consists of “throne” toilets that have a woven (think wicker, but with living, still-flexible broadleaf rushes, not dried and hardened fibers) basket of harlmusk beneath. “Harlmusk” is a plant that looks like a thick ground-lichen rising into eruptions that look like irregularly-planted Brussels sprouts, and it feeds on the excrement of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, orcs, and most omnivorous mammals. So the smells and disease of raw sewage is unknown in Lothen; when a harlmusk threatens to outgrow its basket, the basket is simply carted off into the forest and dumped, some of the harlmusk and a little forest loam being put back into the bottom of the basket (or a new basket, if the living-rush-weave is too worn or “open” to hold weight any longer), and put back under a throne. As a result of years upon years of this practice, the forest around Lothen is lush indeed, attracting many birds and small furry forest creatures, and the elven inhabitants got very good at “gardening” the forest, with many trails, encouraging the most daily useful (and valuable) edible plants and herbal-source plants to grow amid their towers, and hardier and less often used plants farther away. As a result, edible woodland animals have always been plentiful around Lothen - - and as a result, foraging orcs, hobgoblins, and marauding monsters (such as owlbears) have been frequent visitors, so the young of the city were led by veterans on frequent patrols (often traveling largely aloft, along networks of tree-boughs, for the local elves could “garden” trees like anything else, and so, over time, shape such networks as desired) to drive away or eliminate such dangers. However, Lothen was a city of scholars, who largely turned their back on overt and devout worship of the elven gods (the “temples” of Lothen are “groves” in the gardens amid the towers, little open spaces with altars that are walled and roofed by elf-reshaped living trees) and sought instead to understand and tame all life and natural forces through experiment and research (what we would term botany, zoology, climatology, alchemy, and the study of magic). The acquisition of knowledge, practical and otherwise, consumed the days and attention of the elders of this city, not defense or conquest of territory or military readiness. It was largely abandoned in the end because someone (intentionally or more likely inadvertently, not knowing the properties of what they were dabbling in) unleashed two local “scourges” (plague-like diseases of minor power, that exhausted themselves before even reaching the boundaries of Lothen). One consumed paper, including the plant weaves many Siluvanedenn were experimenting with. The other ate away, or “twisted,” dweomers: that is, the substance and effects of already-cast magic (either “permanent” operating enchantments, or “hanging” magics that were awaiting future triggers to go into effect). The Lothren elves could find no escape from these scourges, nor solutions: paper records melted away with horrifying speed, and their spells (excepting only those that took immediate, non-lasting effect when cast, like battle magics) started to fail, fade away, or do unintended things. So eventually they all fled, save for a handful of the younger ones who had little personal use for either magic or paper. When orcs next came marauding (on a regular forage raid, in strength and well-armed because bands of orcs that ventured into the vicinity of Lothen so often vanished), that handful didn’t last long. Discovering a city that was theirs for the taking, with abundant food animals, the orcs decided to stay rather than pillaging and moving on. Some of the band went “home” to fetch the rest of their tribe (the Tanglethorns), and the subsequent disappearance of this tribe from its usual haunts didn’t go unnoticed by their traditional foes, the neighboring Sharpspikes, who sent scouts after them. The result was a nasty little summer-long war for control of Lothen, that ended when Horned Lord orcs, led by orc druids of Malar, showed up in force to take the city from the other two (by-then-battleworn) tribes. House Dlardrageth welcomed all of this as cover for their own activities and a deterrent to anyone else showing up to contest the silver spires, who might discover them, and as entertainment. However, elves of Eaerlann were horrified to discover what had happened to Lothen, and some of them launched a raid of their own, hurling many spells at the orcs. Most of those magics went awry, causing the elves to retreat in consternation, deeming the city “cursed” or “tainted” (and therefore “lost” for the time being to some mysterious evil greater than “a few grunting orcs”). Yet the elven spells took a fearsome toll on the orcs, reducing the Tanglethorns to a few dozen and the Sharpspikes to even fewer, shattering their tribal pride and reducing them to lurking, skulking hand-to-maw survivors. The Horned Lord orcs were more numerous, so more of them survived, ninety-odd in all. However, with many elders and war-leaders among the dead, they fell deeper under the sway of their druids of Malar, who instituted “purity hunts” of “disloyal” Horned Lord orcs to cement their own power. These hunts have made the druids feared and hated (but instantly obeyed), and reduced the Horned Lord orcs to around seventy - - even before a power struggle among the druids pitted Horned Lord orc against Horned Lord orc, in a vicious war that’s still going on and has brought their numbers down to around forty. Human druids of Mielikki and Silvanus concerned with the western High Forest saw a chance to weaken, drive out, or even eliminate the orcs, and “raised the forest against them,” sending in all manner of wild woodland beasts (including many of what most humans deem “monsters”) to overrun Lothen. The orcs fought (and ate) as orcs do, withstanding the onslaught but taking heavy losses—so that by the time the spring of 1370 DR begins, only a few dozen of them (in all, including all three tribes) survive, at about the subsistence/roaming foraging bands level. They have fortified nothing, improved nothing, and are now too few to transform the towers and ruins much even if they wanted to; even starting forest fires won’t do much in damp, misty Lothen, with so much stone (and some fauna that will react to fire by seeking to extinguish the fire, as opposed to fleeing). All of which leaves Lothen lush, full of abundant wildlife (and I do mean WILD life), and ripe for the taking. As Hoondatha has said in another thread: easy to take, not so easy to hold (not only will another horde eventually come Lothen’s way, there are orcs - - and others - - who know that “Lothen’s a battleground” right now, and some of them listen to wild rumors and think it must be a battleground because there’s something valuable there to find. Which of course, if you DM anything like I DM, there is. :} Lots of valuables, in fact, even if all of them might not SEEM valuable, at first glance, or might (rightly) seem just the first part of something greater that must be found and pieced together, piece by piece (like the Rod of Seven Parts), to make something greater. Category:Small cities